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Wed 31 July 2013

Becoming a new contributor to open source through Outreach Program for Women and OpenStack

Attracting new contributors and making projects accessible to newcomers is an
important issue to many open source organizations.

I will describe my experiences becoming a new contributor to open source. I
hope that this will be useful to 1) people trying to improve the open source
newcomer experience and 2) people who have never worked on open source and are
interested in becoming contributors.

Tue 30 July 2013

How to install Devstack and Ceilometer on a Vagrant virtual machine

Ceilometer is a fairly new component of OpenStack, so I thought it would be
helpful to document how I install Ceilometer and
DevStack. Ceilometer monitors and gathers data on other components
in OpenStack. For example, one could use Ceilometer to measure CPU usage in
order to bill customers.

In this post, I'll go through how I install Devstack and Ceilometer on a
Vagrant virtual machine running 64-bit Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. Your host
machine should have enough memory, so that it can run a virtual machine with 2
GB RAM.

Mon 01 July 2013

How I setup Pelican

Thu 27 June 2013

Boston WiSE Software Carpentry boot camp

I just finished up my stint as a helper at Software Carpentry's
Women in Science and Engineering boot camp, also known as WiSE. The
event was held at Microsoft's space in Cambridge Center near Boston from June
24 - 25.

Tue 18 June 2013

UMass Amherst Software Carpentry boot camp

A couple years ago, while I was in physics graduate school, I found out about an
organization called Software Carpentry. My
advisor sent me a Nature article about
poor software practices in science
and it quoted Greg Wilson, the founder of Software Carpentry. Around the same
time, I also heard that Software Carpentry was running an online class to teach
scientists software skills. I signed up and really enjoyed the class -- which
covered Python, shell, version control, object oriented programming, regular
expressions, testing, and databases.

Thu 13 June 2013

Demonstrating Pelican, a static site generator

When I was setting up this blog, I initially started with
Wordpress, but then I discovered that many (tech-savvy)
people were using static site generators.

It took me some time to understand what that meant. Most of the common
blogging platforms generate websites dynamically. Wordpress requires SQL to
manage a database containing your blog content. When someone loads your blog
URL, Wordpress generates the requested webpage. Wordpress must be installed on
your webhost/server for this to work.

The idea behind static site generators is to have software on your local
machine that creates webpages and then upload these pages to the webhost. The
webpages have fixed content, hence the description "static site." You don't
need to install anything on the webhost.

Wed 05 June 2013

Hack for Western Mass

This past weekend, I participated in Hack for Western Mass as part of the National Day of Civic Hacking.1 This was my first hackathon and initially I was skeptical that you could accomplish much of anything with strangers during a weekend. But I turned out be wrong.